


Like An Embrace

by vials



Category: A Perfect Spy - John le Carré
Genre: Angst, M/M, Suicide, really messed up ways of loving a person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-26
Updated: 2017-01-26
Packaged: 2018-09-20 03:40:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9473780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vials/pseuds/vials
Summary: This isn't the first time that Pym has put his destiny in Axel's hands, but it will be the last.





	

The wind was strong and cold and carried enough spray from the sea that it could have been raining. The sky certainly threatened it, steel grey and in constant motion, the water reflecting the dull colour. The beach itself was barely visible, all waves and white foam, and as a result the promenade was all but deserted. Aside from a solitary figure braving the weather, there wasn’t a single person in sight; even the stall owners had pulled their shutters down and gone home early, no doubt realising that the weather wouldn’t calm itself before the morning. 

In a way, the bad weather was a blessing. It had certainly answered the question of how the figure would manage to go unnoticed, as not a single pair of eyes watched his slow progress along the seafront, and even the seagulls had taken shelter. The man was tall and windswept, a slight colour to his cheeks from the bracing wind, his hair damp from the spray. He walked awkwardly, like a man with a limp who was trying to conceal it, and he was skinny enough that it wasn’t unusual for him to have to stop and steady himself after a particularly strong gust of wind. There was a slight frown on his face, but whether it was there because of the weather or because of something else entirely was anyone’s guess. 

Eventually he reached the end of the promenade, where the path curved away from the sea and towards the small village ahead. He paused for a moment and turned, staying quite still as he looked out across the beach. It was just as empty as it had been for the entirety of his slow progress along its shore, but for a moment it looked as though his eyes were following something only he could see along where there should have been sand. The wind whipped around him with enough force that he could barely hear anything, and when he could it was only the sound of the waves smashing themselves against rock and concrete. It was so loud that it almost took the breath from him. He closed his eyes and listened, and after only a few short seconds it was too much. He opened his eyes with a soft gasp, glancing around as though he expected to see something other than the same scene he had so briefly left. 

Whatever he had expected to see was a mystery to him. An answer, maybe, or a ghost. Should it have been the latter he wouldn’t have cared, so long as he could have demanded answers from it, too. Ridiculous, really, how he was wasting time like this. He knew exactly where he could find his answers, and it wouldn’t be on this beach. He wasn’t the only person who had tried and failed to find such things here. 

It was the thought that finally made him turn away. The isolation was undeniable and he gave up disguising his limp, vowing to save his efforts for when he got to the town. He didn’t look back, and he felt no urge to. How strange, he thought, that the first time he saw this place was also to be his last – and he didn’t even want to take a closer look.

*

The rain had just started to drum on the windows when there was a forceful knock on the door. The sound of it echoed through the house despite the noise from the weather outside, and Pym couldn’t explain why hearing it made him feel suddenly cold.

Miss Dubber didn’t seem to share any of his apprehension, no matter how brief it had been. Pym looked to her to see if she was perhaps expecting anybody, seeing that she was in the process of heaving herself out of her chair.

“For goodness’ sake,” she muttered as she did so. “Can people not read? It says no vacancies right in the window!”

“Perhaps the weather is making it difficult to see,” Pym said, getting to his feet, though he didn’t know why. “Sit down, Miss D. I’ll get it.”

Thankfully the old woman didn’t need too much persuading; she dropped back into her seat, craning her neck slightly as though she had a hope of peering through a gap in the curtain and maybe seeing who it was. 

“I suppose we can’t well keep someone out in _that_ , can we?” she asked, as Pym headed for the hall. “Especially if there are no other places open. For crying out loud, I can’t charge someone to sleep on the sofa.”

“That might not be necessary,” Pym told her, smiling at her as he reached the doorway. “Stop worrying yourself. I’ll sort it out.”

It was a short journey from the living room to the front door, which was a testimony to how quickly Pym’s demeanour changed rapidly as he cycled through several different emotions, finally settling on ‘polite refusal’ as he unlocked the door. There was no peephole here and Pym wasn’t surprised – what was the point in having one when practically everyone who called would be a stranger? It was a disadvantage now, of course, and in the split second before he opened the door there was no end to who it could potentially be standing out there. It was Mary, he thought. No, it was Tom. It was Jack, it was Poppy, it was Lippsie, it was Rick. In a split second Pym had prepared speeches for them all, even with the knowledge that whatever he had planned on saying would die in his throat the second he saw them.

He opened the door, and was right, of course.

Axel looked practically drowned. He was shivering lightly where he stood, his coat keeping the rain off most of his clothing but doing nothing for the water that had trickled down from his hair, over his face and down his neck. His trousers were soaked up to the knee, his coat wrapped around him and held there with skinny arms, his hands white with cold. Pym wanted to pull him inside and hold him until he stopped shivering. Pym wanted to slam the door on him.

“Poppy,” he managed, quietly, his voice coming from far away. 

“You seem to have picked a bad spot for a holiday, Sir Magnus,” Axel replied, and Pym managed a small laugh. 

“You came,” he said, still in disbelief, and Axel simply nodded. 

“Shut the door!” Miss Dubber called suddenly from the living room; Pym was ashamed to admit that her voice had made him start slightly. “I can feel the draught from here. Who _is_ it, anyway?”

Pym glanced at Axel, who raised an eyebrow, amused.

“It’s –” Pym began, before realising that for all his urging Axel to come to him, he hadn’t considered the problem of Miss Dubber. “It’s for me, Miss D. A relative. Is it alright if I let him in? He can share my room.”

“I don’t mind what you do, so long as that blasted door gets closed.”

The hallway was small enough that they were practically touching when Pym ushered Axel inside. He could feel the cold radiating from his body, and he wondered how far he had walked. Whatever the distance, he supposed it wouldn’t be the furthest Axel had ever walked, and for a moment it was almost a younger Axel standing in front of him instead, unsure and out of his depth but committed to it anyway, whatever ‘it’ might be.

“An odd thing to call your mother, isn’t it?” Axel asked softly, his voice barely audible over the rain even with the door firmly shut on it. “Miss D?”

“It’s an English thing,” Pym told him, seeing an amused glint in Axel’s dark eyes. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Will she want to meet me?” Axel asked. “It might make the relative excuse a little difficult to continue with, don’t you think?”

“I’ll think of something,” Pym assured him, and he did, though he couldn’t remember what he had told Miss Dubber that had allowed him and Axel to slip unquestioned up the stairs. 

It was slow progress, what with the steepness and the clear pain Axel was in from his walking and the cold, damp weather. Pym remembered now that had always been the worst kind of weather for Axel’s hip; there had been a time where Axel had joked that he always knew when rain was coming because of how difficult it would become for him to move around, and as the time had passed Pym had wondered more and more if it wasn’t actually the truth. Perhaps it was paranoid, but he thought he could feel Miss Dubber’s eyes on them for their entire slow ascent; eventually it became too much to bear and he slipped an arm around Axel’s small waist, taking most of his weight as he practically carried him up the rest of the stairs. 

“Here,” he said, once they were in his room. “Let me.”

He didn’t miss how heavily Axel leaned on him as he helped him out of his wet coat, and the jacket underneath it, too. He looked exhausted, Pym thought, the tiredness evident in every part of him. He wondered when the last time he’d slept had been, or the last time he had eaten, or the last time he’d had any moment to relax. Something that could have been guilt stirred in the pit of Pym’s stomach and he swallowed it back, telling Axel to sit on the bed while he got his shoes off. 

“You’ll have to wear some of my clothes,” Pym told him – by the time they had removed everything that had been uncomfortably wet, Axel was down to his underwear and a shirt. “It’ll be a bit ill fitting, but you don’t seem to have brought anything with you.”

“I didn’t think there would be much point,” Axel said simply, and Pym let the words register but refused to think about them.

“When did you get here?” Pym asked. “How long did it take? When did you leave?”

He was holding the clothing in his arms; Axel gave a small smile and nodded at them.

“Perhaps let me put some clothes on before I start answering questions, Sir Magnus.”

“Right! Right, sorry.”

He handed the clothes over and while Axel’s smile didn’t waver, Pym didn’t miss the searching look Axel gave him. He wasn’t sure why it made him look away.

*

Axel lay on his back, one arm dangling off the side of the bed, a cigarette held loosely in his fingers. He didn’t sit up to take a drag, instead bringing his hand up to his face and blowing the smoke directly upwards, watching it curl and vanish above him. He could have thought they had all the time in the world.

He could see Pym, just, in his peripheral vision. He was sitting at the desk, the chair turned to face him, and Axel could fill in the rest of the scene with what he had seen on his way in. The desk would be covered in papers and envelopes, scattered all over the place though Axel had no doubt that Pym knew exactly what was on every one of them. The radio sat on the floor, silent. The curtains were closed, and the rain was incessant. If he closed his eyes, Axel could almost pretend they were back in Bern, restlessly passing time because the weather wouldn’t allow them to walk.

“How is your leg?” Pym asked, and Axel got the impression that he had been following his train of thought.

“Stiff,” Axel replied. He could feel it like a heavy weight. He wanted to stretch it out, but knew better than to try. “You would think it would be used to this by now.”

“Long walks?”

“In bad weather. The cold. I supposed there are some things you never get used to.”

“When did you leave?”

“As soon as I got your message. I expected it would come.”

“I thought you might.”

Axel took another drag of his cigarette, wondering where he should begin. He knew that Pym was waiting for the story; he was expectant, the way he always was when he knew Axel had things to say but didn’t yet have the words to say them. He was tired, the thoughts coming to him slowly, and how to put them into words coming even slower. There was something desperate about the situation, Axel thought. Before, he had always felt as though they’d had all the time in the world. Even when the situation had been dire, there had never been this sense of finality. Axel would have said that he felt like a prisoner facing his inevitable execution, but he had been in that position before and it was incomparable.

He could feel Pym watching him, and he wanted to turn and meet his gaze but found something was stopping him. He hadn’t yet managed to put his finger on it. There was a wildness in Pym’s look that put him on edge.

“I met Mary,” he said, and his voice sounded odd; almost too normal for the circumstances. “I don’t think she liked me very much.”

It was only when Pym responded in Czech rather than German that Axel realised what had been different about his words.

“Of course she doesn’t. I think she knows she’s been sharing me with you.”

“Women, hmm?” Axel asked, teasing, but the amusement didn’t last. The heaviness in the room was impossible to ignore. 

“How did you find me?” Pym asked. “You really remembered? After all these years?”

“It serves me well to remember a lot,” Axel replied, taking another drag of his cigarette. He tapped the ash onto the floor and if Pym disapproved he didn’t say anything. Axel got the impression that he too had no energy left to care about appearances. “Yes, I remembered. I thought it was the only logical place left to look; the phone call simply confirmed it. I didn’t think you would go far. You did always say that the best place to hide was close to home. Who would look for you there?”

“But you knew it wasn’t my mother.”

“Of course I did.”

“And you never asked.”

“I think we of all people are entitled to a few secrets of our own, don’t you?” Axel asked. “All our lives spent keeping other people’s, it seems only fair.”

“Were you ever curious?”

“Naturally.”

“I’m glad I’m not the only one.”

Axel took another slow drag of the cigarette, watching the smoke dissipate entirely before he spoke again.

“You have wondered about my secrets, too?”

“Incessantly.”

“I suppose I expected that.”

“Did you ever get the urge to tell anyone?” Pym asked, and something in his voice made Axel move, propping himself up on an elbow to look at him. At first glance Pym appeared as he always did; only with closer inspection did Axel notice the slight flickers of his expression, and the way his eyes didn’t seem capable of resting on any one spot of his face.

“I had no one to tell,” Axel said, and Pym’s eyes settled ever so briefly on his. “But even if I had, no. I would never have had the urge to tell anyone. You know as well as I do that secrets are secrets for a reason, Sir Magnus.”

“I know,” Pym said, almost sheepish. “I know. I _do_ , Poppy.”

“Which brings me to the question,” Axel said, still looking at him. “What am I really doing here? Or is that a secret, too?”

*

Pym told him. The words came out in a rush before he could stop to think about them, before he could think too much about the risk he was taking – that in these last crucial moments, Axel might hate him.

“It’s all there,” he eventually concluded, breathless, feeling his face was flushed. “Every bit of it. I’ve been working on it for –” He paused, realising he didn’t know how many days it had been. His mind was fuzzy around the edges, sparking erratically with lack of sleep. “Well, for a few days, at least. Nonstop. I had to ask if you’d ever considered it, Poppy. You have– you have no idea how it feels. I feel so light. Does that make sense? I didn’t realise what a weight it was until I got it all out of me.”

Somewhere during his talking, Axel had sat up. He was at the edge of the bed, a new cigarette burning between his fingers, and Pym couldn’t read what he might be thinking. Axel’s dark eyes hadn’t left his face since he had sat up, and as the minutes had passed his silence had become the loudest thing in the room. Pym had hoped for an idea of where he stood by now, but there was nothing. The first unpleasant twists of anxiety and regret had started in the pit of his stomach, but Pym forced them away. It was too late now.

“Everything,” Axel eventually repeated. It wasn’t a question, nor was it a statement. Pym thought the word sounded empty somehow, and immediately the twists in his gut were back.

“Everything,” he said. 

“Bern?” Axel asked, and Pym nodded. “And what you did?” 

It was one of those rare acknowledgements; Pym nodded again, though stiffly. 

“And what about after that?” Axel asked shortly; Pym got the impression that he would have raised his voice if it wasn’t for his lifelong dedication to discretion. “Have you told them about the barn, Sir Magnus? Have you told them about me? About what I did for you? Is that all there, too?”

“Everything is there,” Pym said, and somehow his voice remained steady. “I told you, Poppy. It’s all there. It has to be. There’s no other way.”

Axel nodded, taking a pull from the cigarette, and Pym saw how his hand trembled as he did so. He held the smoke in his lungs for a beat longer than usual, and then he let it out slowly through his nose, shaking his head. 

“All of that drivel about being free,” he said. “You swore you would protect me, Sir Magnus. You promised to deny me.”

“I know,” Pym said. “And I am. I am protecting you. Why do you think I brought you here?”

“Here?” Axel asked, raising an eyebrow. “Right into the lion’s den, of course! How very courteous of you. And where shall I go after this? Once word gets back to my people, do you really think I will be allowed to continue my life there?”

Pym wanted to say something about how that wasn’t a guarantee, but he wasn’t naïve enough to believe it for a moment. He knew Axel understood as well as he did that his words wouldn’t go straight to Tom and remain only with him. God knows how old Tom would be before he was finally allowed to read them. Everyone else would read them before that, he was certain – Jack, of course, and whoever else, and Pym knew as well as Axel did that at least a few of those people would be reporting back to the other side. Perhaps it wouldn’t happen in a month, or in a year, but the fact remained that Axel’s time in Czechoslovakia was numbered, a clock that had been counting down since Pym had first put pen to paper. He had known this.

Axel rarely looked angry with him, but Pym never forgot it when he did. He supposed in the past he had been lucky. Nothing compared to how Axel was looking at him now, his dark eyes glinting with something beyond what Pym had ever seen there before. He was visibly shaking, and it took everything Pym had not to jump up to support him when he stood up. To Pym’s complete surprise, Axel’s limp seemed all but gone in the few steps it took him to clear the space between them, and suddenly he was right in front of him, the anger coming off him in waves as he stood over where Pym still sat in the chair.

“You bastard, Pym,” Axel said quietly, and Pym wondered just how long he had wanted to say it. The thought distracted him enough that he didn’t notice the blur of movement at his side until the last moment, and by then it was too late. There was a sudden, searing pain in the crook of his neck, unlike anything Pym had ever felt before. His breath came to him in a gasp and he went rigidly still, the pain travelling down the length of his arm and up again into his head, making him break out almost immediately into a sweat. The pain was briefly all he could think about, until something else finally reached him, stinging at his nose – something was burning, and only then did the immediate pain vanish, leaving behind a sickening sting that was no better than the initial pain. 

Still gasping, Pym blinked tears out of his eyes. His entire body felt too hot. Axel was still standing over him, but the cigarette in his hand was now extinguished. 

“Christ!” Pym managed, but his voice shook, and somehow talking just made the pain worse.

“I could do more,” Axel said, his own voice unsteady. He sounded on the verge of shouting again, and Pym wondered if he would be able to resist this time. “I _should_ do more. I should kill you right now and set fire to everything you have in this room. I should beat you until I’m absolutely sure this is all there is. I could, Sir Magnus. I’ve had plenty of practise, sitting where you are.”

Pym swallowed, realising suddenly what the situation was reminiscent of, though probably more so for Axel than for him. The burn at his neck seethed with pain, and Pym couldn’t ignore it for a moment. The heat was overwhelming. He tried to imagine the size of a cigarette end, knowing it was tiny. How his entire upper left side felt as though it had been set alight was a mystery. He remembered, suddenly, the small white circles that had peppered Axel’s skin; on the backs of his hands, the insides of his wrists, the backs of his knees. He felt sick.

“If you feel you must, then go ahead,” Pym eventually said. The words were an effort when the pain made him so short of breath. “That is why I told you. I thought you deserved the opportunity.”

“I know,” Axel said, his eyes briefly searching Pym’s face before travelling down to the burn and staying there. “And if I decided to take that course of action, I wouldn’t have stopped there. You take pain surprisingly well, Sir Magnus, for someone not used to it.”

“I doubt this compares to any of your experience,” Pym said, and a tight smile briefly appeared on Axel’s face.

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t. And thanks to you, I’m sure I’ll have plenty more of it to look forward to. They’ll kill me this time, without a doubt, but I’m sure they’ll make sure that there’s not much left to kill by the time they’re done. I imagine it would be a mercy at that point, so naturally they’ll make me beg for it first. But such is the way this game goes sometimes, wouldn’t you agree?”

Pym watched as Axel’s eyes finally moved away from the burn, travelling instead to the desk, where the piles of paper were still stacked haphazardly across it. Pym felt a sudden surge of protectiveness, finding himself suddenly willing to hurt Axel if he made a move towards it, followed immediately by the realisation that he wouldn’t be able to.

Axel didn’t move. He stared for a long moment, and when he looked back to Pym he was Poppy again.

“I have been unfair to you,” he said, shaking his head. “I am acting as though I didn’t know this was precisely what I was walking into.”

Pym watched him limp back to the bed.

*

“If you have a plan, Sir Magnus, I must insist you tell me now.”

It was Pym’s turn to lay on the bed, where he had been for the last hour. Axel had remained beside him up until the claustrophobia had become too much – not anything of Pym’s doing, of course, but rather something that Axel hadn’t been able to explain until now. He sat on the chair, which he had dragged around the side of the desk so he could sit while periodically peeking out of a gap in the curtains, being careful never to disturb the fabric.

“What’s the situation?” Pym asked. He sounded distant, which was something Axel had grown used to as the night had progressed.

“I believe they have us surrounded,” Axel said simply. “There is no way out now. I think they might even be on the roof. Whatever you plan on doing, I would say now is the time. And for your sake, it had better not be surrendering.”

Pym nodded but remained otherwise motionless. Axel turned back from the window, leaning against the back of the seat and looking at him.

“I had it in my head that you were going to kill yourself,” he said, and Pym turned to look at him, his arms still folded behind his head. The position must have been causing him some pain considering the burn, but Axel rather thought that was intentional.

“Did you?”

“Yes,” Axel said, nodding. “I thought that it was probably your only option at this point. I had no idea you were going to confess to everything like you did, but I saw the other signs. The heat being on you, and the evidence undeniably adding up. You haven’t been right for a while. You’ve been run thin. I don’t think there’s anything left.” He paused, giving Pym a chance to take it in, or argue back, or whatever it was he might want to do. When Pym remained silent, Axel spoke again. “There isn’t anything left. We’ve all had our piece of you, haven’t we?”

Pym moved then, shifting slightly and rolling onto his side. He propped himself up on an elbow not unlike Axel earlier, and his fingers went almost absently to the angry burn on his neck. It was an ugly sight, already blistered and covered in a thick film. The pain didn’t register on Pym’s face as he briefly traced his fingers over it.

“Everything I gave to you, Poppy, I gave willingly.”

“And now you want me to come with you.”

Axel managed a small smile as he said the words, but he could feel how tired it was, and he knew it didn’t reach his eyes. He had no energy left to pretend otherwise; every part of him ached and his brain was dull with exhaustion. He wanted to sleep and found himself wishing that he could, and that he would open his eyes again and find he was back in their attic in Bern, but god only knew how much separated the people they had been then from the people they were now, and the people they were now had no time for such mercies. 

Pym had stood up, crossing over to where Axel sat and leaning over him so he could peer out through the gap in the curtains. Axel felt him holding his breath so he didn’t disturb them; when he moved back again, his face was tight. The look vanished as soon as he realised Axel had noticed, and he looked down at him, still impossibly close.

“I hope you don’t feel as though I’ve put your back against the wall,” he said, and Axel managed a brief laugh that sounded somewhat genuine.

“Of course you have,” he said. “I wouldn’t have expected anything less.”

“There’s still a chance,” Pym told him. “They don’t know you’re here. You could hide, easily. They wouldn’t be looking for you, so it would be easy for you to slip away.”

“And go where?” Axel asked. “I’m an old man, Sir Magnus. Far too old to wander cross-country again, and certainly far too old to have as many enemies as I do. After this gets out, I’m sure that number will double. No, you wouldn’t have asked me to come here if you didn’t have a good guess at what my answer would be when all was revealed. I think you knew my answer before I did.”

*

Pym thought it would be easier. By the time they found themselves in the bathroom there was an urgency in the air and Pym found himself with one ear on the front door, expecting to hear it splintered open at any moment. The bathroom was small and the air was still damp from a bath earlier in the evening; they had to stand pressed against one another, partly because of the size of the room and partly because the damp was only making Axel’s leg worse. Pym couldn’t remember when he slid his arm around Axel’s waist but he must have done so at some point, because Axel was leaning heavily on it, letting Pym take as much of his weight as possible.

Pym couldn’t remember the last time Axel was so tired, and the more he thought about it the more he realised that he hadn’t seen Axel this tired in all their years together. He wondered just how much of this was the pain in Axel’s hip, and how much of it was the fact that Axel simply couldn’t hold himself up anymore, despite his best efforts. Pym found the thought suddenly disturbing – how many times had Axel dragged himself through the harshest of odds and somehow found the strength to keep going? How many times had he battled his own body, because the alternative was only more pain, perhaps even death? And what had happened that made Axel so calmly face what he had been actively resisting for so long?

“You aren’t just doing this for me?” he asked, barely aware he had spoken the words out loud. He only realised he had when Axel looked at him, something faraway in his eyes clearing. 

“What do you mean?”

“I mean –” Pym began, but found he didn’t have the words.

“You are trying to ask me if I want to die,” Axel said simply, and Pym nodded. “The answer is no,” Axel added, and Pym felt something cold in his chest. “But I think that’s normal. I do not think anybody wants to die, Sir Magnus. Not even you. I think what people actually want is an escape, and when you are in a situation like ours, what other escape is there? So no, I do not want to die, but I dislike the idea of the alternative even more. If death is how I escape that, then so be it. Besides, I know for a fact that there are worse ways to go.”

Pym looked at him, searching for any sign that Axel might be trying to convince himself as well, but found none. Axel looked positively defiant, his voice possessing strength that his body didn’t. Pym loved him then, perhaps more than he had ever loved him, perhaps more than he had ever loved anyone. The gun felt heavy in his hand as he raised it; Axel’s face registered nothing as Pym pressed it to Axel’s head, just behind his ear, but Pym felt Axel’s hand move up, grabbing him by a fistful of his shirt and holding on tightly. They stared at one another for what felt like an age, everything they had no time to say hanging between them, and then Axel kissed him.

The kiss was brief but within it was the weight of all the others they had missed; that they have never given themselves the opportunity to have. Almost as soon as Pym had registered it was happening, it was over, and Axel was looking at him again, breathless and damp-eyed. Pym could still feel the warmth where his lips had been.

“Make it a good shot, Sir Magnus,” Axel said, and Pym couldn’t believe how steady his voice was. “I don’t think I could forgive an error here.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Pym said, and waited until Axel smiled.

The shot was impossibly loud in the small room. Pym had tightened his grip around Axel’s waist as he pulled the trigger and felt him immediately crumple, his grip on Pym’s clothing going slack but their bodies keeping his hand pressed against Pym’s chest. For a moment Pym could barely breathe through the pain, as though he had been the one shot and somehow survived it. He stared straight ahead, looking at the spot where Axel’s smile had been. There was red on the shattered mirror to his left and he didn’t look at it. Through the ringing in his ears he could hear footsteps, so many of them, in the hallway and maybe right outside the door. Perhaps they had finally kicked the door in. In that moment it was all possible. 

Pym could feel something warm and damp seeping through his clothing where he held Axel against him, and finally the haze seemed to lift and the pain receded enough for him to think clearly. He was surprised at how calmly his thoughts came to him. The gun barrel was warm and he held it in the same place, just behind the ear. His hand was steady and the gun didn’t tremble as he leaned against it. He thought he could maybe hear someone banging on the door, but whether it was downstairs or just behind him he couldn’t tell.

Pym tightened his grip on Axel. He had sworn he would protect him. He had promised it; that should they ever come for him, should they beat him or torture him or interrogate him, he wouldn’t give them so much of a piece of Axel. The second shot was testimony.


End file.
